Cadillac XTS Sedan Needs a Slow Hand

ENLARGE

2013 Cadillac XTS sedan
Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal

By

Dan Neil

Updated Aug. 24, 2012 5:32 p.m. ET

I AM CADILLAC'S clumsy lover.

Caress though I might the new capacitive (touch-sensitive), Apple-y switchgear, I cannot make it yield to me. A barely-there brush, a back-arching touch…. Nothing. Come on, I just wanna turn up the volume. No? Well, can I get a little cabin heat going? Let's slow jam.

The CUE dashboard interface in Cadillac's cool new XTS sedan should take only a couple of weeks to get used to for tech-savvy drivers, says Dan Neil. For others, maybe a used Fleetwood Brougham? Dan Neil has details on The News Hub.

I want to be fair and precise here. There is a lot on the line for Cadillac with its new man-machine interface, the CUE, the "Cadillac User Experience," which I'm pretty sure Jimi Hendrix didn't play for. The system, which I sampled in a 2013 XTS full-size sedan, previews the cockpit of every new Cadillac for the next five years, and it is fairly named: If the CUE doesn't work fantastically well, the whole Cadillac experience stumbles. Though General Motors' flagship division may dread the comparison, the CUE is to Cadillac what the first-generation iDrive was to BMW: admirably ambitious, defining, a system that offered much to those who could seduce it.

The gadgety guts of the Cadillac include three central components: The graphics-based instrument cluster (with a choice of four gauge arrays that fly in and out of view according to the driver's whim, a la the Jaguar XJ); the 8-inch, capacitive touch screen situated mid-dash, accessing an iPhone-like terrain of icons, apps and assorted JavaScript (navigation, phone, info and audio); and below the screen, the "hard" buttons for volume, HVAC and seat temperature, which are also capacitive and integrated into the flush, glass-like black fascia.

‘Device-savvy drivers will surely get used to Cadillac's CUE interface after just a couple of weeks. Everyone else? Here's your shawl.’

The location of these slider-based controls is landmarked with delicate and handsome alloy strips, the biggest of which is shaped like a spent staple. The center console has a proximity sensor so that the panel wakes up as it senses your hand moving toward it. Both panels, the upper and lower, employ haptic feedback to acknowledge the operators' taps and sweeps—a little shudder in the skin of the panel, a pulse quickened, a throb, un frisson.

Ah, well, it's a bittersweet thing. I fumbled and petted and pawed at these panels like it was the eighth-grade picnic and got nowhere. The controls were frequently unresponsive. Mainly my problem seems to be that I was applying too much pressure to the virtual buttons, or else I was missing them altogether as the car bounded down the road, or I was being impatient. In any event, pas de frisson.

Photos: 2013 Cadillac XTS A New Touch

Click here to view the slideshow Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal

Wow. The Cadillac User Experience is rejection.

In all seriousness, there is nothing wrong with the CUE that a few weeks of practice wouldn't fix, and that tells us something important about the product planners' state of mind. The people who put this cabin together deliberately and knowingly sacrificed some degree of user-friendliness in order to achieve the sleek, nocturnal, obsidian-waterfall look of the center console.

This seems defensible. First, if you had a hard button for all of the car's myriad audio/info/phone/navi functions, the cabin would look like the cockpit of a 707. The CUE system positively sprawls with convenience. Second, while CUE does require some learned dexterity to operate effectively, it's only dexterity. Drivers will learn. Third, post-iPhone, it's reasonable to assume younger buyers will bring their device-savvy e-skills to bear. Fourth, in the new realm where Cadillac operates—call it the lower upper-third of the premium market, just below BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz—design innovation makes a huge difference. People love shiny objects.

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And, it has to be said, Cadillac's new interior design language, as advanced by the XTS, rocks pretty hard. The XTS cabin is smartly organized and geometrically satisfying, sewed tight in stitched leather (real or faux, depending on trim level), alloy trim and optional wood. At night, a soft LED ambience suffuses the cabin like ground fog. A middlebrow modernism prevails. My judgment is that the aesthetics of Cadillac's new glass-panel cockpit are worth whatever typing lessons are involved.

And a good thing, too, since it's identical to the one in the new ATS compact sport sedan, a BMW 3-series contender upon which much of Cadillac's future credibility depends.

Now, if you're the type to shake your cane in rage at fiddly and uncooperative electric doodads, then perhaps, henceforth, Cadillac products will not be for you. That's OK. It only means you're no longer a target in Cadillac's target audience. Here's your shawl.

In the long, breeched postbankruptcy rebirth of Cadillac, the XTS would not seem to have much going for it. It is not the big, six-passenger, livery-trade scow that the DTS was, nor does it replace the personal-performance STS. Cadillac's rear-drive luxury flagship has yet to break cover (it's probably the LTS and probably coming in 2015), and the real money, as everyone knows, is in SUVs and crossovers. Based on GM's Epsilon II platform—Buick LaCrosse, Chevrolet Impala—the front-drive, 3.6-liter XTS ($45,000-$60,000) competes most directly with the Acura RL and Lincoln MKS, which is frankly not much of a mandate.

Even so, the XTS has some charisma. After looking at the car through a camera lens for a half-day, I have come to appreciate its controlled surface details and dignified volumes. The corners of the car are sharpened with vertical light bars in the headlamps, fog lamps and taillamps—now, officially, a Cadillac thing—and the car, benefiting from the foundational presence of 19-inch chrome-alloy wheels concealing huge Brembo brakes, has a serious silhouette. I like it.

It also has the advantage of being a pretty big car without casting too big a shadow (202 inches in overall length, 3.3 inches less than a BMW 7-series). The trunk is a vast 18 cubic feet and the rear cabin has a relatively spacious 40 inches of rear legroom, more than in an Audi A6, Cadillac would like you to know.

The XTS's chassis tuning is also quite good for such a middle-child of a car. With magnetic dampers in front and air suspension in back, the XTS's ride is agreeably serene but composed, firming up nicely under lateral cornering loads and laying into corners well planted. The hydraulic steering is crisp and reactive, with a secure, self-centering gravity on the highway.

Given the sturdy legs under the car, a little more horsepower would be welcome. Alas. The car's 3.6-liter, direct-injection V6—304 horsepower and 264 pound-feet of torque—makes some throaty sounds and is certainly game enough, but it doesn't have the sporting sinew of a flagship Cadillac, which, again, this isn't.

So I never did get that loving feeling from the Cadillac's CUE system. And now the XTS test car is gone, gone, gone. I hope to try again with the ATS, which I'll get in a couple of weeks. Meantime, no recriminations. No one's to blame. We just want different things. It's not you. It's me.

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